The Cossacks better fulfilled the purpose for which they were settled on the frontier. Active, enterprising, and accustomed to partisan warfare, they were admirably adapted for resisting the incursions of the mountaineers. If they have been less efficient of late years, the blame must be laid on the inordinate demands of the government, the extreme contempt with which they are treated by the Russian generals, and, above all, the extinction of the privileges which had been wisely conferred on them in the beginning, and which alone could guarantee to the empire the maintenance of their vigorous military organisation.
The Black Sea Cossacks, as every one is aware, are descended from the Zaporogues of the Dniepr, whose famous military corporation appears to have been established towards the end of the fifteenth century. Continually engaged against the Tatars of the Crimea, the Ukraine Cossacks founded at this period a sort of colony near the mouths of the Dniepr, consisting exclusively of unmarried men, whose special avocation it was to guard the frontiers. Their numbers rapidly increased, deserters from all nations being attracted to them by the hope of booty, and their setcha, or head-quarters, on an island of the Dniepr, became famous throughout the land for the military services and the valour of its inhabitants. In 1540, such was the importance of these colonies to Poland, that King Sigismund granted a large tract of land above the cataracts to the Zaporogues, in order to strengthen the barrier erected by them between his dominions and the Tatars.
The new settlements on the Dniepr for a long time followed the fortune of the Cossacks of Little Russia. But as their strength augmented continually, they at last detached themselves from the mother country, and became an independent military state. The supremacy of the tzars was imposed on Little Russia in 1664, and from that time the Zaporogues, deprived of their allies, and left entirely to their own resources, owned allegiance, according to circumstances, to the Turks or the Tatars, to Poland or Russia, until the rebellion of Mazeppa, in which they took part, led to the total destruction of their power. Some years afterwards we find them again rallied under the protection of the khans of the Crimea; but Russia soon assumed so formidable an attitude in those parts, that they were at last constrained, in 1737, to acknowledge themselves vassals of the empire.
But the political decline of the unfortunate Zaporogues did not stop there. During the war that preceded the treaty of Koutchouk Kainardji, a strong desire for independence was excited among them by the arbitrary acts of Russia. Many of their detachments fought even in the ranks of the Turks. Then it was that Catherine determined on completely rooting out the military colony of the Dniepr. The Zaporogues were expelled by force from their territory, which was given to other cultivators; and some of them emigrated beyond the Danube, while others were transported to the neighbourhood of Bielgorod. Ten years afterwards, when war broke out again with Turkey, a great number of the latter volunteered into the Russian armies. After the peace of Jassy, Prince Potemkin, who had formed them into regiments, was so pleased with their valour and fidelity, that he induced Catherine to settle them beyond the strait of the Kertch, and intrust them with the defence of the Circassian border. They were also granted, along with the peninsula of Taman, the whole territory comprised between the Kouban and the Sea of Azof, and extending eastward to the confluent of the Laba, and northward to the river Eia. The Zaporogues then took the appellation of Cossacks of the Black Sea, and their organisation was assimilated to that of their brethren of the Don. They had an attaman, nominated for life by the emperor, out of a list of candidates chosen by themselves; and the civil and military affairs of the community were directed, under this supreme chief, by two permanent functionaries, and four assessors changed every three years. Other privileges were likewise accorded to them, consisting chiefly in exemption from all taxes, the free use of the salt-pools, the right of terminating all litigations without having recourse to the St. Petersburg courts of appeal, and in the pledge given to them by the government, that their regiments should never be required to serve beyond their own territory.